“On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship” is a 1789 essay by French philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet. Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet (1743–1794), more commonly known as Nicolas de Condorcet, was a French mathematician and philosopher who espoused equal rights people of all genders and races, a liberal economy, free public instruction, and the importance of a constitutional government. Said to have been the very embodiment of the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, Condorcet died in prison as a result of his attempting to escape French Revolutionary authorities. Within this essay, he argues that, according to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, rights are universal; and if that is indeed true, then they should apply to all adults—women included. A fascinating example of early feminist literature, “On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship” will greatly appeal to those with an interest in the history of feminism and its most notable proponents. Read & Co. Great Essays is proudly republishing this classic essay now in a new edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

In this landmark book, the historian Linda K. Kerber opens up this important and neglected subject for the first time. She begins during the Revolution, when married women did not have the same obligation as their husbands to be "patriots," and ends in the present, when men and women still have different obligations to serve in the armed forces.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The First Essay on the Political Rights of Women" by Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat marquis de Condorcet. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Women of the Republic views the American Revolution through women's eyes. Previous histories have rarely recognized that the battle for independence was also a woman's war. The "women of the army" toiled in army hospitals, kitchens, and laundries. Civilian women were spies, fund raisers, innkeepers, suppliers of food and clothing. Recruiters, whether patriot or tory, found men more willing to join the army when their wives and daughters could be counted on to keep the farms in operation and to resist enchroachment from squatters. "I have Don as much to Carrey on the warr as maney that Sett Now at the healm of government," wrote one impoverished woman, and she was right. Women of the Republic is the result of a seven-year search for women's diaries, letters, and legal records. Achieving a remarkable comprehensiveness, it describes women's participation in the war, evaluates changes in their education in the late eighteenth century, describes the novels and histories women read and wrote, and analyzes their status in law and society. The rhetoric of the Revolution, full of insistence on rights and freedom in opposition to dictatorial masters, posed questions about the position of women in marriage as well as in the polity, but few of the implications of this rhetoric were recognized. How much liberty and equality for women? How much pursuit of happiness? How much justice? When American political theory failed to define a program for the participation of women in the public arena, women themselves had to develop an ideology of female patriotism. They promoted the notion that women could guarantee the continuing health of the republic by nurturing public-spirited sons and husbands. This limited ideology of "Republican Motherhood" is a measure of the political and social conservatism of the Revolution. The subsequent history of women in America is the story of women's efforts to accomplish for themselves what the Revolution did not.

Over fifty years ago sociologist T. H. Marshall first opened the modern debate about the evolution of full citizenship in modern nation-states, arguing that it proceeded in three stages: from civil rights, to political rights, and finally to social rights. The shortcomings of this model were clear to feminist scholars. As political theorist Carol Pateman argued, the modern social contract undergirding nation-states was from the start premised on an implicit "sexual contract." According to Pateman, the birth of modern democracy necessarily resulted in the political erasure of women. Since the 1990s feminist historians have realized that Marshall's typology failed to describe adequately developments that affected women in France. An examination of the role of women and gender in welfare-state development suggested that social rights rooted in republican notions of womanhood came early and fast for women in France even while political and economic rights would continue to lag behind. While their considerable access to social citizenship privileges shaped their prospects, the absence of women's formal rights still dominates the conversation. Practiced Citizenship offers a significant rereading of that narrative. Through an analysis of how citizenship was lived, practiced, and deployed by women in France in the modern period, Practiced Citizenship demonstrates how gender normativity and the resulting constraints placed on women nevertheless created opportunities for a renegotiation of the social and sexual contract.

In the 1890s, German feminists fighting for female higher education envied American women their small colleges. Yet by 1910, German women could study at any German university, a level of educational access not reached by American women until the 1960s. This book investigates this development as well as the cultural significance of the tremendous debate generated by aspiring female students. Central to Mazón's analysis is the concept of academic citizenship, a complex discourse permeating German student life. Shaped by this ideal, the student years were a crucial stage in the formation of masculine identity in the educated middle class, and a female student was unthinkable. Only by emphasizing the need for female gynecologists and teachers did the women's movement carve out a niche for academic women. Because the nineteenth-century German university was the model for the modern research university, the controversy resonates with contemporary American debates surrounding multiculturalism and higher education.

Interest in citizenship has never been higher. But what does it mean to be a citizen in a modern, complex community? Richard Bellamy approaches the subject of citizenship from a political perspective and, in clear and accessible language, addresses the complexities behind this highly topical issue.